Ship’s Log A Journey Behind The Scenes Of The Most Expensive Movie Ever
I was standing on the deck of the Titanic.
All around me terrified people were screaming, scrambling up the decks of the listing ship. Some were clinging to the rails while others jumped into the dark, frigid water below. It gave me goosebumps.
“Cut, cut, cut, cut … ,” the assistant director’s voice boomed godlike over the public address system. “Reset, ladies and gentleman, reset.”
The screaming stopped abruptly. Until the next shot.
Nearly a year ago, I took my own personal journey on the “Titanic,” the most anticipated movie of the year and, at a reported $200 million-plus, the most expensive movie ever made.
I was hanging out on the set with my sister, Laurel, a one-time Spokane resident who was among a dozen hairdressers working with the huge cast of extras on the film. My sissy - who landed the job because she knew someone who knew someone who was doing the hiring - was just a tiny cog in the big movie-making machine. Little did she realize when it all started that she would spend nine months living in Mexico, doing little besides working and sleeping.
During my short visit to the Mexican studio built for the film, I learned just how many cogs it takes for such a huge production. And some of the people I met on the set had Spokane connections. But more about that later.
The warm January afternoon I arrived at the studio, which was located about 30 miles south of San Diego near Rosarito Beach, Mexico, I was blown away by the star of the show - the ship itself.
This Titanic sat on an enormous waterfront lot that was like a small, self-sufficient city. There was a building where props were created. Offices doubled as dressing rooms. Several sound-sets were the size of airplane hangars. A structure that looked like a circus tent was the company cafeteria, where hundreds of cast and crew dined on such gourmet grub as fried plantains, black beans and Jamaican jerk pork. (During my visit, “lunch” was served around midnight.)
If you’ve heard anything about this movie, it probably concerns the astronomical price tag, even without major box office stars.
The main reason the Titanic will float again - with the bill footed by two studios - has to do with the box-office clout of director James Cameron. This was a very personal project for the man who made such blockbusters as “Aliens,” “The Terminator” and its sequel.
The buzz around the set was that Cameron had agreed to direct several upcoming action flicks in exchange for “Titanic.”
Long before all the hype began about the cost of the production, it was easy to see where the money was spent.
For this film, the Titanic was basically rebuilt using the original blueprints. The latest version was 90 percent of the original size at 790 feet long. The attention to detail was astonishing, right down to the authentic gleaming brass fixtures, sturdy wooden deck chairs and ornate chandeliers.
Even from the nearby road, the ship was something to see - an elegant ocean liner that would never float on the ocean.
Up close, the Titanic was even more impressive. This re-creation of the doomed vessel was parked in a specially constructed 17-million-gallon cement tank with the Pacific Ocean looming in the background.
On the backside of the authentic facade, there was a hulking shell filled with a massive labyrinth of scaffolding. The portholes were covered with pictures, so it looked like you were peaking into the elegant staterooms. Everywhere, miles of electrical cable snaked through the place.
Cast and crew members bustled around constantly, stopping occasionally to down a shot of wheatgrass or a cappuccino from the craft-services tent set up in the middle of the “ship.”
Nearby, a boxcar-size elevator blasted off regularly for the decks above. It was manned by one of the 500 Mexican crew working on this production. He didn’t speak English, but he smiled and nodded as people filed in.
The shooting that was done while I was there focused on the climactic sinking of the ship - as the real Titanic did in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, with 1,517 men, women and children still on board.
Some of those riveting photos showing up in national magazines such as Entertainment Weekly and Movieline were taken while I was on board - the shots of people being lowered in the lifeboats.
I experienced vertigo watching the extras climb into teetering lifeboats that hung at least 200 feet above the water. They weren’t acting when they shivered from the cold. They had to sit there for hours while enormous lights were adjusted and cameras positioned.
Because the ship sank in the early morning, much of the filming took place throughout the night. That meant people were always stifling yawns.
Some of the extras talked about feeling a ghostly presence while filming scenes of the ship sinking. A few broke down and cried, thinking about the people who had died so tragically.
My sister’s typical 14-hour day began at 3 p.m., when she grabbed some “breakfast,” sweet-talking the food-service guys grilling burgers to throw on a veggie burger for her.
Laurel worked in a drab concrete building in an area called “the crowd room.” Around 4, a steady stream of costumed extras started filling the dozen chairs to have their hair teased, shaped and sprayed into elaborate period hairdos. A boombox blared. On the walls, old photographs of Theda Bara and other silent film stars offered inspiration.
In Hollywood, extras are referred to as human props. “Titanic” was unusual because so many of those props were used - as many as 1,000 were needed through the filming.
Some of the extras my sister worked on stuck around for months and became friendly, sharing intimate details of their lives. There was the former producer from CNN who had moved to San Diego to take a job at a local station only to get downsized. There was the perky college student who studied for finals between takes. And there was the woman, fluent in Russian, who traveled often to the Soviet Union to help privatize companies. There were lots of retired people and one entire family - grandparents, mom and three little kids - who had signed up on a whim and stayed on for months.
Many of them commuted daily between San Diego and the set during the lengthy shoot. They might have complained, but they kept coming back.
Confirming the traditional hairstylist stereotype, the parade of women who sat at Laurel’s station gossiped incessantly. They gabbed about how much money everyone made, which extra was the biggest camera hog, who was fooling around with whom. One of the hairdressers was getting cozy with Kate Winslet’s personal trainer. It was entertaining dish.
After all that hair was in place, Laurel followed the extras up to the Titanic’s deck. She and other hairdressers wandered around with a bag full of combs and hair spray, making sure that bobby pins were securely tucked in and tendrils of hair weren’t being whipped by the ever-present wind.
Like most productions, a lot of time was spent sitting around and waiting for the next shot to be set up. “Isn’t show biz glamourous?” quipped one stuntwoman.
So, I had visited with the extras and been awed by the set, but where were the stars?
“You stood right next to Kate (Winslet) at the salad bar during lunch,” Laurel said.
The winsome Winslet’s hair was red for her role as the Titanic heroine, so she looked nothing like the fresh-faced blond girl she played in “Sense and Sensibility” in 1995.
My sister made it a point not to be starstruck, even though some high-wattage celebs visited the set throughout the filming. (Still, she managed to snap a photo or two, mugging with bad guy Billy Zane, with Kathy Bates - who plays the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown - and taking a paparazzi-style shot of a visiting Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
Look, there’s Leo, she said.
That’s Leo as in Leonardo DiCaprio, teen heartthrob and leading-man-in-the-making, who was sucking on a cigarette, looking bored. He plays Winslet’s star-crossed lover, the guy from third class who falls for the rich girl.
He sat in this chair and ran his hands through his sandy blond hair. He was adorable, but aloof.
Later, he and Winslet snuggled on the deck. Ah, so that’s what it meant to get “in character.”
That night, one scene called for the pair to run through a panicked crowd. After being jostled, a winded Winslet ran off camera and asked if she could take a swig from Laurel’s water bottle.
“I’m going to save this,” Laurel joked. “It might be worth a lot of money someday.”
The next night, we watched from a man-made jetty as dozens of stunt performers jumped off the ship into the water. It was thrilling and scary. As always, there was a team of divers standing by should anyone get hurt. They rode on pontoon boats that deftly maneuvered around the 12-acre tank.
The same shot was done over and over, maybe a dozen times. Each time, Laurel helped the stuntwomen out of the water and frantically piled their dripping hair back on top of their heads.
In between shots, I spotted a guy wearing a Colville National Forest T-shirt. I introduced myself to Jeff Duda, a native of Kettle Falls who now lives in San Diego.
An aquatic engineer, Duda was in charge of keeping the huge cement tank filled with sea water, which was chlorinated.
His girlfriend, Sharon King, was the on-set milliner whose regular job involved minding hundreds of museum-quality hats. On that night King was handing towels to the stunt performers as they got out of the tank.
“I need a shirt that says ‘I got a college education for this?”’ she said.
The following night, I met someone who had spent a few months in Spokane during the filming of “Benny & Joon.” T.C. Badalato, who was one of a half-dozen assistant directors on the “Titanic,” said the 1992 film was one of his favorite jobs.
“Spokane was a nice place to work, very laid-back,” Badalato said.
This late evening was far from laid-back. Badalato was trying to set up a shot in a crowded gangway near the ships’ waterline, talking to others on a headset. But the lighting wasn’t right. There was a lot of commotion as people tried to fine-tune it. A woman arrived with a can of brown spray paint and squirted it on a brilliant light fixture.
“When you think of trying to light something that’s three stories high and hundreds of feet long, it’s a logistical nightmare,” Badalato said.
After a frustrating few hours trying to get one shot off in these close quarters, everyone was cranky.
One of the grips - a guy who physically moves lights around - yelled instructions in Spanish to a Mexican stage hand positioned in the guts of the ship. He wanted him to drape a dark sheet over a certain porthole 20 feet above and something was getting lost in the translation.
“Aqui, aqui …” (Over here, in English.)
After the lighting was finally copacetic, the actor my sister had been asked to primp - Danny Nucci - needed some attention, but he waved her off. The Italian actor didn’t like stylists fussing with his thick, dark locks.
All this preparation - more than two hours of standing around waiting for adjustments to be made - would probably translate to a few seconds of the movie.
But it was all in a day’s work, right?
I asked Badalato if he thought the movie would be a hit.
“Usually I can never tell if something’s going to be good, but this script is great, really moving,” he said.
During the three nights I watched filming, director Cameron rarely came down off a small camera-laden platform that was suspended by an enormous crane.
Hearing that Cameron was a big Titanic buff, I arrived on the set with a model of the historic ship that I intended to give him as a gift, a sort of ice-breaker (hah!). But I never got anywhere near the man.
It certainly seemed that Cameron was treated with a godlike reverence by the cast and crew.
People referred to him as “Jim,” but I got the impression they never were that casual when talking to the tall, intense Cameron face-to-face.
That’s not to say he was this unapproachable ogre.
One night I overheard someone talking about how a little girl, an extra, who had walked right up to Cameron and asked if she could have a line.
Sure, he said, just say, “Help, Mommy.”
One of the members of the Titanic Historical Society, who had traveled from her home in Massachusetts to be an extra, said she was impressed by Cameron’s knowledge and enthusiasm.
“We were walking along the well deck and he noticed that an expansion joint didn’t look quite right, so he had someone fix it,” said Karen Kamuda, vice president of the 5,500-member organization. “That probably won’t even show up on the screen and if it does, the average person isn’t going to notice.”
But then, isn’t that the point?
What makes movies so magical is that they offer the kind of delicious escape that doesn’t demand scrutiny. Audiences recognize and, perhaps, identify with the stars up on the screen, but the set melts into the background if it’s done right. And the huge crew that had been like a family gets on with their next job after the film “wraps.”
Sometimes, when my sister wasn’t needed on the set, she pulled on her pink satin eyeshades, stuck in some ear plugs and took a nap.
Once, Laurel dreamed she was standing on the deck of the Titanic and that it was sinking fast. She looked around for the rest of the crew, but it wasn’t a movie anymore.
Just then, someone shook her awake and told her it was time to get back up to the set.
I imagine the Titanic will inhabit her dreams for the rest of her life.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 8 Color Photos
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ‘Titanic’ James Cameron’s “Titanic,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane and Kathy Bates, opens Friday.